Spotted Knapweed. Happy Sunday!

“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus

The spotted Knapweed is in boom in all the hayfields of southern Maine right now...and will be for several more weeks. It makes a bright display along roadsides, and attracts butterflies...but farmers do not like it. It’s roots interfere with the growth of the hay, and its presence in harvested hay reduces the value for livestock. It is an invasive species, which evidently came into the US from Eastern Europe with imported alfalfa seed and soil used for ships’ ballast in the late 1800s. It is everywhere in southern Maine. 

I have mixed feelings about the Knapweed. It is not long lasting enough to be grown as an ornamental and its offensive roots would cause a problem in most flowerbeds anyway...and it is not good for fodder...so, unless you are a butterfly, it is not an attractive plant. And yet I can’t resist photographing it every year. It is beautiful, I think, in a prickly, thistley kind of way. And it certainly makes the hayfields beautiful this time of year, when lupine has already past. I guess I will just have to pretend I am a butterfly :) 

We humans seem to believe that beauty is its own reason for being. We will forgive a lot if something is pleasing to the eye. On the other hand it takes a truly generous eye to see the value in what is not obviously beautiful. All that the Creator makes is beautiful in some way, if we can only see it. I don’t need butterflies eyes to see the beauty of the Knapweed. I just need a more generous eye. May you be surrounded by beauty today. Happy Sunday!